"Oh, choke you and your pipe together, Larry! will you never have done?" said the widow.
"The most improvinist thing in the world is smokin'," said Larry, who had now relit his pipe, and squatted himself on a three-legged stool beside the widow's fire. "The most improvinist in the world"—(paugh!)—and a parenthetical whiff of tobacco-smoke curled out of the corner of Larry's mouth—"is smokin': for the smoke shows you, as it were, the life o' man passin' away like a puff—(paugh!)—just like that; and the tibakky turns to ashes like his poor perishable body; for, as the song says—
"'Tibakky is an Indian weed,
Alive at morn and dead at eve;
It lives but an hour,
Is cut down like a flower,
Think o' this when you're smoking tiba-akky!'"
And Larry sung the ditty as he crammed some of the weed into the bowl of his pipe with his little finger.
"Why, you're as good as a sarmint this evenin', Larry," said the widow, as she lifted the iron pot on the fire.
"There's worse sarmints nor that, I can tell you," rejoined Larry, who took up the old song again—